I assume I don’t have to spell this out for human beings reading this...

I needed it spelled out, so maybe I'm even dumber than Ron Dermer and/or cane toads.

I don't see this as a stupid talking point generally, though it is (as you observe) flawed in this instance. But the overall point it makes is valid: body counts don't necessarily tell you who's right and who's wrong. That's just one reason why I think it's generally a mistake (or at the least a bad strategy) to argue from body counts. When you look at the number of Iraqis killed by the US do you look at people killed directly? Indirectly? By sanctions? By proxies? And on the Iraqi side do you total up just US soldiers killed after the 2003 invasion, or everyone ever killed anywhere (directly or indirectly) by Saddam Hussein? Etc, etc. And does any of that tell you what you really need to know to judge US actions in Iraq? The important points quickly get lost in details that don't matter.

Same thing with Israel/Palestine: I think arguing body counts misses the critical points and opens the door for BS talking points like "Israel warns people before it bombs" and "Israel does everything possible to minimize civilian casualties". Who gives a shit? The Nazis wouldn't have been the good guys if they'd just warned some of their victims ahead of time, and the Israeli position isn't any less wrong for it either. (These two BS talking points happen to be largely true, BTW, but not for the reasons Israeli propagandists would have us think.)

I'd also say that just calling this stupid and insulting anyone who finds it otherwise is a strategic mistake in that it isn't likely to convince anyone who's not already on side. You may consider those people a write-off, but I think it's best to act as though anyone can be convinced, because I've been surprised on that count many times.

Might also be worth noting that some of those dead WW2 Germans were German Jews (and others) killed by other Germans.

i agree with john caruso's first point (you don't necessarily find out who is 'right' by counting bodies, because it's hard to know which bodies to count)

i associate myself with this opinion of his even though I am persona non grata at his blog - i guess he has written me off although i don't know why - which relates, sort of, to his second point, which i don't agree with -

this blog's audience, imho, does not include any significant number of well-meaning although uninformed or misinformed persons who may be open to new information or perspectives, so calling israeli propaganda "a milestone in human stupidity", while arguably hyperbolic, is NOT turning off people who otherwise might hear the voice of sweet reason - again, this is my opinion, and some fraction of what i tell you is wrong - i just don't know which part

mistah charley, ph. d., no no no not at all, you're about as grata as a persona can get at my blog. I'm guessing you're saying that because your recent comment didn't show up, but that was because I put in place blanket comment block rules about a year ago since I was dealing with a few dozen spam comments a day but practically no valid ones (since I was no longer posting). And I neglected to remove those blanket rules when I put up that recent posting. I'm very sorry if I caused you even momentarily to think anything but that I feel you're a great person, since that's been my impression over years of bloggage.

To the points, glad you agree on the first one. On the second, well, I assume I'm not the only one here who needed Jon's point made more explicitly. But beyond that Jon's primarily active on Twitter these days, and ATR mainly gets his "long tweets" (like this one), and his Twitter audience definitely includes folks beyond the usual suspects here on the blog (and he's frequently retweeted to other peoples' readers as well). He'd been tweeting the THIS TALKING POINT IS STOOPID stuff for a while, and getting respondents who didn't get his point, to whom he literally responded "ow ow ow ow ow please stop with the stupid". I engaged with one of those people here (in part--Twitter threading is a mess)...:

https://twitter.com/DistantOcean/status/489090188807655424

...and I think it went pretty well, and even suspect based on timing of his responses etc that some of what I said may have given him some second thoughts. Which couldn't have happened if I'd just called him a moron. BTW, Jon's pointed his Twitter readership at this posting at least three times and gotten over 20 retweets.

So that's what I'm getting at. Generally speaking my operating principle with Internet political commentary has always been that you never know who's going to read what you've written now or in the future, so it's worth keeping those people in mind. In fact if anything I consider them the primary audience. You'll rarely change your direct interlocutor's mind (I doubt I changed "Patrick H"'s, though I hope I at least made a dent), but you have a much better chance of getting through to someone reading along.

john caruso - thanks for the clarification about why my comment did not post at your blog

also thanks for the info on jon schwarz's shift of focus to the twitterverse - which is, for me, terra incognita - as a somewhat set-in-my-ways time traveler from the 20th century, i have so far not ventured there, but maybe later

I feel you re: Twitter, but in this case you can just think of it as a microblog version of ATR and check https://twitter.com/tinyrevolution/ periodically for updates the same way you currently check this blog (except Jon's pretty chatty over there so there's more to read). No signup, special apps or actual "following" required.

The same goes for anyone else you'd like to read on Twitter, BTW--just replace the "tinyrevolution" in that link with their Twitter handle.

I agree with John Caruso. In civil society, "proportionality" of a response to aggression matters; in war, there is no obligation that one's response be proportional. Thus, body counts are morally irrelevant (unless you're a pacifist, of whom there are very few). Dermer is right in that sense.

What does matter is the nature of your disproportionate killing spree, i.e., whether or not it is a response to aggression (self-defense). If it's not self-defense, then it's not just "disproportionate" but wrong. In other words, if you start a war (and per Jon Schwartz's post Israel's blockade of Gaza is an unprovoked act of war), then you're not in a position to complain about the manner in which your victim responds to your aggression.

In civil society, "proportionality" of a response to aggression matters; in war, there is no obligation that one's response be proportional. Thus, body counts are morally irrelevant (unless you're a pacifist, of whom there are very few). Dermer is right in that sense.

Proportionality is definitely part of the Geneva Conventions. On the other hand, I believe Israel has never signed this part:

http://www.icrc.org/customary-ihl/eng/docs/v2_cha_chapter4_rule14

Jon - Just want to note that yours is my favorite political blog, even if it's only occasionally updated. I don't deny that the concept of proportionality is incorporated into the Geneva Conventions but I question whether the Geneva Conventions provide an adequate guide to moral reasoning in these matters. Do the Conventions say that if country X is invaded by country Y, and country X suffers 100 casualties, that country X is prohibited from wiping out country Y's invading army of 10,000 soldiers? (I sincerely don't know the answer to this.)

The principle of proportionality relates to the military advantage gained vs the potential damage to civilians and civilian infrastructure (so not just the civilian death toll, and arguably not at all the military death toll); see Article 8(2)(b)(iv) of the ICC Elements of Crimes or Article 51 of the Protocol Addition to the Geneva Conventions, for example. So no, there are no hard ratios. It's an ambiguous concept and therefore a judgment call as to whether or not any given instance is "proportional", and whether the purported lack of proportionality would actually be a violation of international law. Which is one of the reasons it's regularly ignored without much fear of consequences, even by nations like the US and Israel that greatly fear international law since they violate it so regularly.

I didn't read this posting closely the first time around, but I just realized that near the end Jon refutes his own point:

Let’s imagine a World War II where Germany only killed 300,000 Americans, i.e., no one from any other country, and yet America killed seven million Germans. In this weird, hypothetical version of “World” War II, America would have been the bad guys.

This is exactly Dermer et al's argument. We don't judge whether or not America and the other Allied nations were the good or bad guys in WWII based solely on the body counts — and by the same token, you can't judge whether or not Israel is right or wrong based solely on the body counts. That's why Jon's point that the Nazis killed more than just Americans, while true, is also no more than a quibble in terms of the overall point, which is absolutely valid (and also well-established in the minds of the majority of Americans since they apply it every time the US military attacks another victim).

Hopefully this doesn't make him conclude he's stupider than 70 trillion cane toads (hornier, maybe, but definitely not stupider).

[ADDING: I thought Jon must have meant the quoted statement ironically, but now I realize he may actually have meant it straight. Which if it's the right reading could open up the whole cane toad question again, since nobody in their right mind would conclude the Nazis were anything but "the bad guys" even if they'd killed fewer people overall than the Allies.]

nobody in their right mind would conclude the Nazis were anything but "the bad guys" even if they'd killed fewer people overall than the Allies

History would definitely record us as the bad guys if we'd killed seven million Germans – including the massive firebombing of civilians – and they'd just killed 300,000 U.S. soldiers. The Nazis wouldn't be remembered as "The Nazis" without everyone else they killed.

That's arguable even with the lopsided example you're using (and though it's easy to craft artificial scenarios where the answer's clear, that doesn't prove the general point). The Axis:Allied body count ratio in WWII was around 5:1, so what if the Nazis killed 100,000 people and the U.S. killed 500,000 people? Would the U.S. have been the bad guys then? Leaving the Nazis as "the good guys" despite their fascist ideology and their goal of purging the world of Jews, Gypsies, gays and other Untermenschen? Of course not.

On the topic at hand, the death toll in Gaza currently stands around 350. If a Palestinian group somehow managed to smuggle a bomb into a convention center and kill 375 Israelis, would Israel's Gaza assault suddenly become morally justified? Or if Palestinians detonated a neutron bomb in Haifa and killed enough Israelis to take the overall death toll lead since 1948, would that mean that 66 years of occupation — including checkpoints, land confiscation, mass imprisonment and torture, house demolitions, economic strangulation, military assaults and all the other methods of collective punishment and slow-motion ethnic cleansing Israel has used on the Palestinians — was retroactively validated? Of course not.

Death tolls just aren't the right way to judge who are the good guys or bad guys, and as I said I think it's nearly always a mistake to focus on them rather than on the underlying situation.

If a Palestinian were able to kill 375 Israelis at one time, and certainly if they evened the score back to 1948 all at once, it wouldn't retroactively validate Israel's actions, but it would change the overall present day moral calculus for many, many people -- including me, if it were the latter.

But note that these hypothetical examples are unrealistic -- you're making the assumption that the conflict would then suddenly stop, which it certainly wouldn't. If Palestinians somehow evened the score, Israel would then kill millions of them, and almost certainly nuke Iran. That lack of proportionality is built into the basic structure of the conflict, and is a key part of the moral judgment that most people make.

Note also that you're finding it necessary to come up with weird hypothetical examples, rather than any real historical ones. Maybe there are some real ones, but I can't think of any. That's because the moral judgment of most people is (except when their own countries are involved) deeply based on a sense of proportionality, of which death counts are a key part.

If a Palestinian were able to kill 375 Israelis at one time, and certainly if they evened the score back to 1948 all at once, it wouldn't retroactively validate Israel's actions, but it certainly would change the overall present day moral calculus for many, many people -- including me, if it were the latter.

Wow. My mind is officially blown — I'm really surprised you'd reconsider whether or not Israel was in the right just based on body counts. I certainly wouldn't. And I'd strongly disagree that body counts (with the exception of wildly lopsided examples) are a primary factor in most people's moral calculus. I'm sure most people haven't got the faintest clue how many people the ANC's military wing and the apartheid South African government killed through the 1980s, and I'm just as sure it doesn't matter to them; they believe that apartheid was wrong because racist, discriminatory policies are wrong, not because of its death toll.

I'd agree that for people who share our (fringe) ideological perspective it's true that in history, the side that killed the most people is generally the side that was in the wrong. But it's absolutely not true for the majority of Americans, who do not share our ideology and who are (as I said) used to seeing the U.S. kill more of the enemy du jour, after they've been convinced that the war against that enemy is justified (e.g. in Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Iraq and so on). And I doubt it's true for very many non-Americans either — people just don't hold out for body count information before making moral judgments, and in most cases where they do make moral judgments they probably have no concrete information about the relative body counts.

The main impact body counts have is to affect people's judgments about proportionality — which can be worthwhile, but doesn't get to the critical points and is unlikely to change minds. Even in a case like Gaza where the deaths are overwhelmingly Palestinian, the most that pointing that out will tend to do is to convince people who currently think Israel is in the right that Israel is a) still in the right but b) overreacting. And that generalizes.